So I walked out of Waltz With Bashir very stunned and kind of not knowing what to say to my classmates that I watched it with.  I found out that the movie was based on actual events and decided to do a little research before watching it.  I visited the site and briefly watched the trailer and definitely was NOT expecting things to be how they were in the movie.  Initially when watching the opening scene of the movie, I was somewhat reminded of that Charles Schwab commercial which used Rotoscoping.  However, after watching the entire movie, I noticed other animation techniques.  I thought of Flash and maybe After Effects

I liked that the animations were very detailed, everything down to the lip movements and emotional expressions helped me to treat me movie as though it was a story being told, instead of an ANIMATION.  I got lost in waiting for the details of history to unfold.    

The subtitles kind of threw me off because I was trying to pay attention to the illustration and read at the same time.  So it ended up turning into me trying to read quickly so I can look at the action and details within the movie.  I wondered why there wasn’t an English version to this movie.  I understand the need to differentiate the countries or parties involved (i.e. the only english speaking portions of the movie were either the music or when English speaking people intervened), but I got a little annoyed that I couldn’t fully pay attention to all of the illustrations for the sake of following the story.   

The story and events were like many stories I had heard about or documentaries or saw in the news where the effect of war on families and cultures is blatantly evident.  However, unlike a lot of documentaries that I have watched that mostly tell the story of the political power figures and their rise, fall or reign over a certain country.   Waltz with Bashir mostly focused on the effects of war on army members and the civilian families residing in the country.  Even those people that survived could never go back to living normal lives based on the fact that their loved ones were so horribly killed.  Despite the fact that it was an animation it didn’t make it less disturbing for me to see families shot and children laying dead in rubble (Part of it had to do with the fact that the story is based on actual events).  The scenes in this movie just repeated the fact that war is useless and doesn’t get any points across.  People get killed by unknown persons and the persons that are doing he shooting are shooting unknown people.  The scene towards the beginning of the movie where they were moving the dead bodies through in the tank through the night.  One of the soldiers asked what everyone should do and the response was “just shoot.”  I’m pretty sure  things like that actually do happen during war for the sake of the troops protecting themselves from any civilians retaliating with their own weapons.  Of course it is a lot more complicated than what I am saying.  We know there are religious and political beliefs involved but my main point is that….in the end no one wins.      It was also kind of like a weird documentary for me where people were interviewed and members of the troops told their accounts of what happened and how they felt.  

Throughout the movie, both the victims and their perpetrators were kind of hidden through animation.  The (very well done) illustrations were a way to tell the story without having to come up with archival footage  However, the use of archival footage was a great way to put some faces on victims of war and reiterate the point that war does more than kill people.